Jack Carroll’s illustrations, part 1 – the dashboards and interiors

So a couple months back, when Jack Carroll presented me with that awesome rendering of Project HMX, I mentioned that he spent several years designing interiors for AMC. In fact, he was there throughout the mid-1960s, when that company started to shed its fuddy-duddy image and start to embrace the youth movement, thanks in no small part to the youthful designs that Jack lent to his interior designs. Not to let a good story opportunity pass, I recently interviewed Jack for a personality profile that will appear in the February issue of Hemmings Classic Car, and Jack was kind enough to let us borrow a notebook with some of his designs from that period. We were able to show some of those designs in the story, and the rest were too cool not to show off somewhere.

To start with, the photo above, and a similar photo that will run with the story, shows Jack working on a large-scale sketch of the Tarpon concept car, back when it was still designed around the American chassis and before it became the Classic-chassised Marlin. Note the twin-stick transmission. This would have been shortly after he landed his job at AMC in 1962.

Jack described this dash proposal as for the 1966 American, and from the photo, it appears this one went all the way to the clay stage before getting nixed. Photo is dated January 16, 1964.

Jack said it was difficult, but not impossible, to remove his sketches and renderings from the studios, and they’d periodically have to clean house and trash all their old, unusued sketches. He said it was possible to save sketches by taking them down to the in-house post office and having them shipped back home, but Jack found another way around the problem: He photographed his drawings on slide film, which remained remarkably preserved over the years.

The above two slides show design concepts for the Tarpon using the existing American dashboard core. The first used just a new instrument cluster, while the second used both a new cluster and a new crashpad.

These three design proposals Jack sketched for the AMX. He said he picked up design cues from the front design of the early AMX. Note the first sketch has the Rogue nameplate on the dashboard. The third sketch’s notes indicate that it used the instrument cluster, heater controls, radio and optional tachometer from the 1967 Ambassador (or from a proposed Ambassador design) and the air conditioning ducts and outlets from the 1964-1967 American.

Another couple of AMX dashboard sketches. Does that second one look familiar? Jack said it served as the basis for designs that Jim Pappas and Jim Alexander developed into the production AMX dashboard. All was not lost on the first of these two: Note the use of woodgrain, which did feature prominently in the production AMX dashboard. Here again, the Rogue nameplate showed up on the glovebox door.

In Jack’s notes, he described these three as advanced concepts for the second-generation AMX – “to further the sports concept appearance beyond the Mustang look.” Note how the first one in this series looks like a natural progression of an earlier first-generation dashboard sketch presented above. Also note in these three how Jack began to play with the wraparound dashboard concept that did eventually make production in the second-generation AMX. The Star Trek-like digital instrumentation he employed in the latter two, however, didn’t see production in an AMC vehicle.

A little more sedate, but no less interesting, were these sketches Jack drafted for the 1967 Rebel and Ambassador instrument panels.

If you’re digging these, stay tuned: We’ll have several more sketches of Jack’s in a follow-up post.

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Marc Tylersays:

December 11, 2008 11:29 am

Thank you so much for posting these, I am really enjoying them. Just such a joy to look at! I do have a technical question. What are the media and techniques? It looks like he worked over a watercolor ground (beautiful, by the way!) and then gouache and marker? I love the crispness and the punchiness.

Marc Tylersays:

December 11, 2008 2:00 pm

I didn’t know they used mufflers to apply color :^) The thing I like about the hand renderings over the CG stuff is those little touches with line thickness and value that can really draw attention to a particular bit that needs calling attention to. It’s just purely a matter of taste or maybe even nostalgia for me. I love looking at these.

I never did learn to use Ad Markers properly, and besides, Xylene makes me feel all pukey.